Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  “A creek, he told us. I don’t know why, it’s something that matters to him. It’ll be fine. We’ll get you home soon enough, and I’ll take you straight to the doctor.”

  “You won’t need to do that.”

  “Oh, what? You’ve been badly cut, that needs cleaning and binding properly, better than I can do it; and someone needs to look at your shoulder too, see if the bone needs setting …”

  “Leave it alone, it’ll all heal. We’ve seen worse on the road; there are worse this morning, they need care more than I do. But what I meant was, you won’t need to take me anywhere. They’ll be waiting on the quayside when we dock.”

  “Who will?”

  “Mei Feng, with doctors.”

  “No, sweets.” You’re delirious, but he wasn’t going to say so: kept his sudden worry to himself. “Mei Feng doesn’t want anything to do with this. And how would she know, anyway, that you were hurt …?”

  “Not me, but she’ll know there will be hurt people in the fleet; and she’ll need to be sure that her grandfather’s come back safe. And she’ll know by now about Jiao and Yu Shan, even if the emperor doesn’t. And the child too, she’ll want to be sure about the child. So she’ll come, and for excuse she’ll bring the emperor’s own doctors. And she won’t tell him, but one of his servants will, so we’ll either come early and have the fun of seeing him chase after her, or—more likely, seeing that Old Yen is taking us all this far out of the way—we’ll come late and he’ll be there already and they will have had their fight without us. But there will still be doctors waiting, and them too. So don’t you worry about me …”

  IT WAS TOO late, of course, not to be worrying about him. Worry was just there, like a weight against his one leg, like an arm wrapped tight around the other. But when he checked, he didn’t think that Shen was bleeding anymore; he might even be a better color, in the better light. And Chung had bound his arm up tight and Shen was being good, not shifting it inside that binding. He said the shoulder hardly hurt at all.

  Then again, he also said that pain didn’t matter, that it could be set aside and stepped away from. Which was so obviously nonsense, Chung reminded himself not to listen to anything else the idiot might say. He would make his own judgments, and bring Shen to the doctor as soon as possible.

  AS SOON AS he was allowed, that meant. For now seemingly they had to keep sailing along the coast here, even though the long stream of boats behind them suggested that the fleet was all together already and there was really no need to go on. Progress was steady, but uncomfortably slow; at least, Chung was uncomfortable in this little sampan and Shen had to be, although he swore not.

  A man with a fast horse might keep pace with them along the coast road. That shouldn’t matter, because no horse could bring a man to sea, but even so he didn’t like the thought of being tracked, watched, perhaps worked against. He didn’t like the sea much either, how it lay there threateningly still, brooding as darkly as the dragon.

  She must be somewhere in that water, as she seemed not to be in the sky. There was no certainty that she would not erupt again; nor any certainty that the goddess would protect them again. She might be angry that they used her—or her child—like a good-luck token, like a guarantee, back and forth across the water. Perhaps she had only meant to allow them one safe passage. Perhaps they should have been grateful, taken the dragon as a warning and her protection as a gift, never dared to look for it again …

  Old Yen would not say that.

  Perhaps.

  He at least was confident of his goddess. But old men always are sure of whatever it is, diet or work or worship, that has allowed them to become so old and sure; and old men too can be overtaken by calamity despite all their certainties, let down at the last by their miracle herb or their hard-set bodies. Or their goddess, not so potent after all. Or not so kindly, not so well disposed.

  Old men can be wrong.

  Also, they can be perverse.

  They can lead a fleet of weary sailors, carrying a cargo of wounded and exhausted men and trailing a second fleet of boats not fit to sail; they can lead them not home but along an enemy coast to one particular creek, one narrow inlet below a headland; and there, where no one could see what kind of force the enemy might be mustering landward, they can toss out an anchor, ignore the fleet entirely, demand a boat ashore.

  OLD YEN hauled on the towrope, drew the sampan up to the high side of his own craft and let himself down into the bows. All without warning, without even a word called down to Chung.

  Then he cast off the rope, made his way to the stern and said, “Take me to the shore.”

  Chung said, “My friend is hurt, he can’t …”

  “He doesn’t need to. You know how to handle those oars, I’ve been watching you. Or do you want me to take them?”

  Chung’s shoulders were on fire and his arms were leaden weights, but no, he didn’t want that. Not with Shen listening, watching, right there.

  Nor did he want to go ashore. It was all delay, when they should have been halfway home by now. He said, “The emperor will be angry, when he hears that you wasted time and kept his men in pain for longer than you had to.” His own anger was meaningless, but the emperor’s—well, the emperor was a god too, as well as a forceful youth. He might be one to set against the Li-goddess, in the old man’s head. Especially with Mei Feng at his side, equally angry with her grandfather.

  But Old Yen said, “It is the emperor’s order,” and then there was nothing more to say, nothing to do but row.

  ACROSS THE narrow span of water to the inlet’s gentle flow, to the western bank below the headland. As soon as he felt the bows grate on shingle Chung was over the side, into waist-deep water. Except that he had to separate himself from Shen first, and so he was not after all so quick, and the old man was ahead of him: plunging in and wading forward, laying tough gnarled hands on the bow and hauling with a will.

  With Chung’s urgent help, the sampan was safely grounded above the water’s reach before Shen had pulled himself awkwardly to his feet aboard.

  A path led upward from this stony beach—or at least, there was a route where men might scramble up the cliff, where others had done it often enough before them. One-handed, it would be hard; one-handed and in pain at every jolting step, it would be dreadful. Shen looked at it and stiffened, set his lips thinly, said not a word.

  Chung spoke for him, to the fisherman: “Why are we here, old man?”

  “There is a temple, up above …”

  Chung nodded; he had seen it, a small square build against the softer shapes of nature. “And, what, you want to make an offering to your goddess?” Would that buy them another safe crossing of the strait?

  “Not that, no. Not that alone,” although he did have a satchel on his shoulder, and his hand touched it lightly at the thought. “There are … people, a few, I had to leave here before. A woman, and her two daughters. We are to fetch them now. It is an order,” stressed again.

  Very well. A woman, and a pair of girls. Chung looked at Shen and said, “Stay here with the boat. We can do this very well without you.”

  It was a swift unspoken conspiracy between them, that Chung would say that and Shen would believe him. They both knew Shen could not climb that cliff and achieve anything at the top, except a strong antipathy to climbing down again.

  “Be careful,” he said. “A woman, after all …”

  “And two girls. I will be careful, I promise. You, too. Watch that boat, watch the water; watch for trouble, and call out if you need me.”

  “And you,” Shen said. “If you need me.”

  They smiled at each other, reasonably content, each knowing the other’s anxiety and thinking it foolish, thinking that this at least should be easy.

  CHUNG HAD meant to go first, but Old Yen swept by him at the foot of the cliff, impatient and imperative. The old man was surefooted on that crumbling slope, and his knotted calves drove him upward at a killing pace. Chung was breathless and s
weating before they reached the top, his legs burning to match the cruel iron ache left in his arms by miles of rowing.

  Old Yen seemed untouched. If he waited for Chung at the top, that was only his native manners; if he waited longer to let Chung recover a little breath and a little composure, that was an effort of manners, made explicit by the old man’s long-suffering silence and his folded arms, his manifest aspect of waiting.

  At last he nodded beyond Chung’s shoulder, to make him turn. There stood the temple, its red clay roof-ridge adorned with gods and dragons—their paint long since peeled away, but their figures still clear beneath the sun—and its corners rising to peaks, topped by further dragons.

  And there beneath the roof, on the top step, stood a woman, with one girl at her side. Still a child, that girl, despite her solemnity; it would be a good thing, Chung thought, to take her to safety. Before the war came to Santung a second time. If there was safety anywhere, it ought to be in the emperor’s shadow, on an island the enemy couldn’t reach.

  Why the emperor would want the girls, or their mother, Chung couldn’t imagine. Imperial motives didn’t matter, though. He could guess at Old Yen’s, and that was enough. Tired as he was, he could help three slight females down the cliff and into the sampan; and then he could row more, as much as he had to, if only he could row home.

  To the temple, then, under the wary gaze of the woman and her daughter both; and pausing one step below for the fisherman to say, “I have good news. What you asked that first night, that I should take you and your daughters to Taishu? I have the emperor’s consent to bring you across today.”

  The woman was small and sour, and unmoved. She said, “I think we have the goddess’s consent to stay.”

  Old Yen blinked, and hesitated; and went on less certainly, “Perhaps I should have said, I have the emperor’s order.”

  “Perhaps you should. It makes no difference here. Do the emperor’s orders reach across the strait? I think Tunghai Wang is in command on this side. And I would not listen to him either, if he spoke against the goddess.”

  “I would never speak against the goddess. I do not. How could I? It was she who brought me safe across, she has kept me safe all my life. She would not force you to remain here, when war is coming …”

  “Is it so? I have seen war, old man, but it didn’t find this house before. The goddess kept it safe. You told me to shelter here, do you remember that? And I have, and she has kept me safe and my girls too. More, she has taken my daughter to be one of her own, while we take care of her and the house together, don’t we, Shola?” The little girl nodded, entirely serious, entirely responsible. “I think the goddess can keep us safe again, if men are stupid again, if they can find anything left to fight over. Come inside, you, and let me show you what we have done.”

  “I have seen already …”

  “It is different now. Come.”

  Inside was smoke and incense and the soft red glow of temple lamps, to set against the bright hard sun outside. And statues, of course, and a few hangings that were not so faded, that Chung thought were new to the temple. And people, too. A girl—or a young woman, almost: husband-high, they would call her on Taishu—knelt before the altar at the front, in the clouds of burning joss, rocking gently and humming beneath her breath. Two men sat shyly against one wall, with a sack of produce at their side. They might have been farmers come to market; likely they were worshippers come to make an offering to the goddess or the priestess, or to both.

  They looked relieved, almost, to see more men come in. Even strangers, even with the weary stink of battle clinging to them. At least, Chung did still smell of blood and smoke. Old Yen smelled of the sea.

  Men know how to deal with men. The woman and girls, perhaps, had overfaced them, here in the house of the goddess; now they got to their feet and bowed tentatively, warily, and still looked nothing but relieved.

  Old Yen nodded back, and turned to the woman. She said, “You see? They took me for a priestess, and the goddess has made it true. Perhaps I should shave my head and be a nun, but it would upset my daughters,” meaning, clearly, the one daughter, the one who rocked and hummed and took no notice of these new arrivals. “Change is difficult, we like to be settled, we like routine,” she does; “so I keep my hair, for now, and we stay here.”

  There was no challenge in her, no confrontation. She said it simply, as a thing that was. Was so, was inevitable, simply was.

  Old Yen had trouble with that, seemingly. He said, “That first night, you begged me to take your daughters at least, if I couldn’t take you. I can do that, I think. They would be safe on Taishu.”

  “They are safe here, now. Under her protection.”

  “No. You know what happened to her temple in the city.”

  “Of course, but this is different. No one touches her here.”

  “Only because this was abandoned and forgotten. If you have brought it back to life, that makes you less safe here, not more.”

  “This is her home now,” the woman said, as stubborn as the fisherman, “and ours too. We will not leave it, no.”

  “You must. She must, at least,” with a nod toward the girl in the smoke. “The emperor has need of her.”

  “Need? Of my daughter? The emperor?”

  “Why not? He is a god too,” echoing Chung’s own thought from before. “The goddess has used her to speak to us, to me,” with a little shudder on the emphasis, as though that was a cursed moment as well as a blessed one, “and now the emperor has use for her. Perhaps he wants to speak back to the goddess, through her. How would I know? I am not his confidant, I am his servant. His messenger. He sent me to fetch her, and I will.”

  “No.” She meant that to be flat and final, all too clearly; and all too clearly, the fisherman was not about to accept her refusal. With orders from the emperor, how would he dare?

  Chung’s easy trip up to the temple and back had suddenly become a great deal more complicated. When the two worshippers glanced at each other and took a pace or two toward their priestess, he wished avidly for Shen—a healthy Shen, a whole Shen, not the drawn and suffering one he’d left down in the sampan—or failing him any other man from the fleet, any of those hard dangerous men so inured to fighting, so heedless of death. A blade looked so natural in their hands, they’d likely not even need to draw one.

  Chung himself was hopeless with a blade in his hand. Here, that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d slipped the awkward tao out of his belt while he rowed, and hadn’t remembered to replace it; his knife he had lost somewhere on the beach, in the battle.

  Unarmed and alone, he stood behind the fisherman and tried to look dangerous, imposing, so much of a threat that no actual threatening was needed.

  Old Yen said, “I will let you stay here, then, for the goddess’s sake, but the girl must come with me. And she will need her sister too; it’s the little girl who looks after her, isn’t that right? I know it is, I have seen …”

  “She said no, old man.” That was one of the local men, stepping up beside the woman, standing between Old Yen and her daughter. Both her daughters, as he shepherded the little girl behind him.

  “You should go now,” the other man said, “and tell your emperor that he cannot have these girls.”

  They were … just men, country men, peasants: built of the land, soil and stone. Strong as a tree is strong, strong to endure. Chung wouldn’t care to wrestle either one of them. The two together, he thought they would probably tear his head off.

  Except that they wouldn’t need to, they could simply cut: what peasant went anywhere in his life without a tao in his belt? Neither one was drawing a blade—yet—in the sanctity of the temple, but if the fisherman pushed this …

  Something in his stance said that the fisherman did not want to push it, that he liked nothing about this errand; but he had his emperor’s commission and he wasn’t backing down.

  He said, “He is the emperor of us all, and you cannot refuse him. You dare not.”r />
  And he went to push past the men, toward the altar; and one of them seized his shoulder and pushed back.

  He was an old man, sure, he carried that in his name; but he had grown old on the sea, he had salt in his bones and his own knotted, tangled kind of strength. He wouldn’t be pushed, not easily.

  And so they wrestled, the fisherman and the peasant; and, what, should Chung only stand and watch as the woman did, when the other peasant went to join in with his friend, to hurl the old man out of there? In defiance of the emperor, and in full sight of his own goddess?

  Chung hurled himself into that battle and was carried out in the general tumble and the turmoil of it all, to roll bumpingly down the steps and onto the stony grass beyond in a tangle of limbs and heads and breathless cursing.

  The peasant men picked themselves up first, and gazed down at the other two with a kind of slow satisfaction, reckoning presumably to know victory when they felt it, defeat when they saw it.

  Then they lifted their heads and looked out over the strait, and their faces changed abruptly.

  Chung almost felt that that moment paid for the bruises and the mud. Almost.

  He stood up slowly, sore in every joint; reached down an arm to help the old man up; turned to look the way that everyone was facing.

  Saw what he knew was there, what the peasants were staring at, what he had not felt the impact of till now, till it was needed: all the fleet spread out across the water, the empty boats and the barely-manned making it look larger even than it was.

  “Yes,” Chung said, improvising furiously in the peasants’ faces, “yes, those are our friends there. That is the fleet sent by the emperor, to escort this woman and her daughters; that is how much he wants, how very much he values them. The old man and I came up alone to fetch them, as a kindness; must we go back down to fetch a dozen men? Two dozen? Two of us you can roll in the mud, perhaps, but must I fetch enough to roll you right off the cliff-edge …?”